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c792c07
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I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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16c411a
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When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a2fdba6
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As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.
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friendship
guest
hospitality
sharing
meals
graciousness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6e55f12
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Sorry to tell you, but that's a very old chestnut. My mother used to say when God slams a door on you, he opens a window.' Tig gave this two seconds of respectful consideration before rejecting it. 'No, that's not the same. I'm saying when God slams a door on you it's probably a shitstorm. You're going to end up in rubble. But it's okay because without all that crap overhead, you're standing in the daylight.' 'Without a roof over your head..
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opportunity
god
optimism
climate-change
end-of-the-world
generation-gap
homeless
unsheltered
shelter
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cd3ed68
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When I'm in a blue mood, I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b0f5759
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The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points suc..
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moth
movement
olfactory
sight
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c31a406
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You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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90f00db
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For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you t..
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food
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6ea657c
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Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes," he still loves to say, as often as possible. "It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a9f00d4
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7e27d7e
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There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he's a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! Father says we're to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to the particulars it's hard to know exactly what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but for sure he'd drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younge..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bcb3615
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It's a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it's treasonous to question our leaders.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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108786d
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While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.
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light
eternity
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2a6b5a2
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I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round but you are so far up there you can look down and see th..
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disappearance
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f6d1561
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Life proceeds, it enrages.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a61836d
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You can resign from the Woman's Club, but the world is all, you can't just stop attending.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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39cda02
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Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought,
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d470b1a
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I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4cdf020
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To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5fe0d1b
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To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall.
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world
nations
peace
diplomacy
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cc4fa6f
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She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.
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humor
coyote
cpr
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bf70882
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When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The "Amen enema", as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3bb8087
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There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2ce61f1
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Simple remedies for dire situations, that's the lesson. In a falling elevator, try to climb up on the person nearby so their body will cushion your landing. Or in a crowded theater when everybody's hightailing it for the fire exit, stick your elbows hard into the ribs of your neighbors to wedge yourself in, then pick up your feet so you won't get trampled. That is how people frequently lose their lives in a riot: somebody steps on your heel..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d88eafe
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If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners--and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society--to ridicule the small gesture.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1b50595
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In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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469aa91
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If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fe3ada1
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What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ccfef7b
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Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms. And nobody considers that unpatriotic. This appears to aggravate Tod Murphy. "We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast,..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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57b51a5
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The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes.
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nature
butterflies
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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86c9146
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on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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43adca7
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Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6e7b115
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Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0ae5ae2
|
You make cheese yourself," she repeated reverently. "You are a real housewife." It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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83e43b1
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Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b13f777
|
According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten com..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3a2f228
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I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dc1333b
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You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional t..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3a49764
|
It's a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, th..
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ignorance
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9471688
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How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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05fcba8
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I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4c9b551
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All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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31d16b0
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On Sunday morning I put on jeans, changed into a denim dress, then back into jeans again, feeling stupid. I can get into a mood where I annoy myself to no end. At the moment when I got completely fed up and stopped caring, I had on jeans and a white cotton shirt and silver earrings, so that's what I wore. And yes, I'll admit it, nice underwear.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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732d998
|
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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Barbara Kingsolver |